“Damn it,” he repeated.
“You swear a great deal,” she observed, crossing her legs as she stood and pretending to poke at the ground with her toes. She wasn’t used to being naked, after all. Of course, she wasn’t really naked. She had her corset and her mask. But she was painfully aware of the red curls showing just under the scalloped bottom of her corset.
“I am a conservative man,” he said. “A sober man.”
“I haven’t offered you a brandy.”
“I didn’t mean it in that sense. I don’t veer around corners, with my reins flying in the wind. I don’t gamble my fortune on the throw of the dice. I don’t—” The words apparently strangled in his throat.
Emma raised one leg slightly, meditatively, looking at the way the light cast through pink silk made her skin look even creamier. But when she looked at him, he wasn’t staring at the rosy shadows cast by the dancing silk, but at the curls between her legs.
“Ah well,” she said, sliding back into her French accent as if she’d never dropped it at all. “It is the way of the world, no? I shall have to find someone else to have my last affaire with before I marry the burgher.”
“Someone else?” he said.
“Well, of course,” she said, turning away from him and bending down to pick up her bodice. It was so heavy that she remained bent for a moment, trying to find the sleeves before she pulled it from the floor.
And then she felt the heavy, warm curve of a body tucking itself around the curve of hers. For a moment she froze. Gil was dressed, and the feeling of his linen shirt against her back, the rougher wool of his breeches against her bottom . . .
Her heart started to thud an uneven rhythm, as if a horse had broken from its traces and was veering into the woods.
Large hands swept through her hair, tossing it up and over her head so that it fell to the floor. His body stayed immobile, keeping her tucked in his curve, trapped by his weight, his body, the feel of him.
“You’re a conservative gentleman,” she pointed out, with just the smallest quaver in her voice.
He pushed forward slightly against her bottom, and she almost toppled to the ground, struck by a wave of weakness in her knees.
“Even conservative men lose their minds sometimes,” he growled in her ear. His fingers had stopped running through her hair, and they were wandering more dangerously now, sliding sweetly down her neck, drawing her upright as they slid to her bosom, pulling her slender, naked body back against his clothed self.
For a moment she thought what they must look like from the other side of the screen, blurred by the rosy silk with her white against his black clothing, her slenderness against his muscle, her sweep of red hair against his wild fall of gypsy hair.
It seemed the village women were right about naked women after all; it merely took a gentleman a bit longer to give up the shreds of his control.
The breath caught in her throat as Gil cupped a hand around her breast, brushing her nipple, making her teeth suddenly snap shut so that she didn’t moan aloud.
“Say it,” he commanded. He had her arched against him now, one hand on her breast, the other sliding over her corset, teasing the bottom edge, sinking lower. His lips ravaged her neck, and her lips parted again as his thumb brushed over her nipple, making her wiggle against him, unknowing, uncertain, but—
“Say—” she gasped. “What should I say?”
“Make that sound again, the one you just made, the one you made in the carriage when you tried to seduce me.”
She gasped, trying to get air into her lungs. That hand was inching closer, down, surely he couldn’t mean to—
His finger sank into her sweetness at the same moment his thumb took that rough pass over her breast again. She didn’t make a breathy, sensual sound, but a squeal.
She didn’t care. She didn’t care. Her head fell back against his shoulder, and she let him do as he will, holding her in place with his hands, his lips caressing her cheeks, the corner of her mouth, the curve of her throat, while his hands worked their magic. She hardly noticed when he nudged her legs apart, when his hands took on a harder, surer rhythm, when it became clear that he wasn’t entirely inebriated during his months in Paris. He had apparently learned some important things.
“Of course,” he whispered in her ear, “I would never do something like this to an English lady born and bred. But you are a Frenchwoman. I learned in Paris that Frenchwomen are terribly demanding.”
“Yes,” she gasped.
His thumb twisted and rubbed again.
“A properly raised Englishwoman would never allow something so depraved to be done to her,” he said, his voice wicked.
He didn’t have to emphasize that fact quite so much, Emma thought dimly. But what he was doing was making her squirm back against him, gasping, pleading for something that he could—
“I could tell that you are Parisian in a moment. Why if I touched an English lady like this—” He rubbed a thumb over her nipple and then squeezed it. “She would scream with pure indignation.”
Emma wasn’t paying any attention to his foolishness anymore. Instead she just arched into his hand and let those sounds fly from her throat right up into the rafters, that is, until his hand stopped.
That was a mistake on his part. Something had been about to happen, something quite unprecedented. It had felt like a firestorm building and flying higher with every—
“What the hell are you doing?” she demanded, in good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon English.
His voice seemed a bit thicker, too, not that it appeased her any. “I thought you might be embarrassed,” he said. “To be standing up and all.”
She wrenched free of him and turned around, hands on her hips, eyes narrowed, suddenly reminded that this was her future husband, and he needed to be taught a few lessons before she took his ring and his baby and all the rest of it.
Her corset was feeling far too tight, so she took a moment and collected her thoughts while she untied the bow on top. He was watching her as closely as a man could, so she took her time unlacing, massaging her poor breasts while she did it. No one could know how hard it was for them to stay jutting up in the air like that for hours, made into an exhibit for every goggle-eyed man for miles around. Finally she tightened the strings on her mask, which made her breasts rise into the air in a pleasing fashion.
Then when she thought he’d had enough punishment—and she did notice that he seemed to be breathing quite hard—she turned away from him and bent down to scoop up her pelisse. She heard the scrape of his foot on the boards and straightened, saying imperiously, “Don’t move!”
He stopped, his eyes sending little sparks in her direction.
Emma was a lady born and bred, and so she took her time lying down and arranging her limbs on her bronze pelisse, making sure that her hair showed to its best advantage.
“Now,” she said, looking back up at the man who stood above her. “Allow me to point out that I am a Frenchwoman.”
There was a twitch at the corner of his mouth.
“We are slow to anger but fierce when indignant,” she told him. “In fact, we may be the fiercest race of people alive on the earth. And since everyone knows that females are fiercer by far than males, it stands to reason that I, as a woman and representative of my nationality, am someone to be feared.”
He had his arms folded over his chest, and he was grinning, but she wasn’t stupid. He was vibrating like a string of a violin.
“I’ll thank you to extinguish all these lights,” she said. “I believe I shall remove my mask.”
He did so. The only light he left was the very dim glow of Jeremy’s lantern, set far off in the corner and certainly not lending enough illumination so that Gil would recognize her, if indeed, he remembered his fiancée’s features at all. Emma pulled off the heavy, jeweled mask and put it to the side. She could hardly see Gil; he was just a tall, shadowy form, but she could feel him: feel his desire reaching toward her, with all th
e inevitability of a spark hitting dry leaves.
“I’ll grant that you are slow to learn, given your nationality,” she told that dark gypsy shape of her future husband severely, “but the time has come for you to mend your ways.”
“Hmmm,” was all he said, but he seemed to be moving toward her right on course and as if he couldn’t help himself, so she let him take his time.
It didn’t take him more than a second to bring her back to that all-important moment, which just goes to show that the man did indeed learn something over in Paris.
And this time, he didn’t stop.
Her body danced to the tune of his fingers, as if she were a puppet on his strings. She gasped, cried out, reached for him. . . .
When she pulled herself back together, she was still lying on her own velvet pelisse, staring up at the dusty rafters far above them. Gil was on his knees over her. And every inch of her body was quivering, as if a forest fire had rushed over her, left her scorched and yet unconsumed, burned and yet desirous.
She took a deep breath and focused on his face. There had to be more to this. In fact, she knew there was more to it. He’d taken off his shirt, but he was still mostly clothed. And even if he was looking at her with naked longing in his eyes, and his hand was shaping her breast in a way that made her press up, in his palm—even so, there was something about him that signaled that he thought he’d won.
Won?
She hadn’t even started to fight.
Slowly, so she didn’t startle him and make him dash back for his shirt and the security of all his vows about not sleeping with women, especially, she was beginning to think, Frenchwomen, she reached out her toes and her arms, and stretched. His eyes were liquid black, watching the arch of her body.
“I gather,” she said, “you are still determined to pay me no favors.”
“Those favors should be reserved for the man you marry.” But his hand was on her breast again, shaping it.
She curled into his palm, making that sound in her throat, the one he liked and the one that seemed to come naturally every time he touched her. Then she nodded, quite as if she understood and didn’t think he was feebleminded which, frankly, she was starting to take as a serious possibility.
“In that case, I would suggest that a gentlemen must allow a lady to reciprocate. Not the favor, since you are disinclined to grant my wishes. But . . .” She caught his eye and held it, “a reciprocation.”
He frowned. “What—”
She pulled her legs to the side and pushed at his shoulder gently, and he finally collapsed on his back, smiling a little crooked smile. For all she knew of the male anatomy (mostly gathered at the births of male babies), she could see from the rise in his pantaloons that there was a miraculous transformation that happened between age one hour and age thirty-two.
But he was like a partridge in the wild: if she startled him, he’d fly away. So she knelt to his side, quite as if she didn’t even notice the way his pantaloons were straining, and ran her hands through his hair. His hair was wild, coarser than hers. It sprang back against her fingers and smelled of woodsmoke and some sort of male soap, strong and not perfumed.
He wasn’t protesting, so she let her fingers do the thinking for her.
His forehead was high, the forehead of a thinking man, a man who knew Shakespeare, the Parliament, and the way not to fall out of a moving carriage. And how to make a woman fall in love with him, in all of one evening. His nose was a narrow aristocratic triumph, a nose handed down from the Elizabethans. His mouth . . . well, his mouth had everything in it. A sardonic laugh, and one of joy. That plump bottom lip knew grief and—unless she was truly mistaken, and Emma had made a practice never to be mistaken—was longing to kiss her breasts.
Men liked kissing a woman’s breasts, for all that Gil had so far only run his hands over her. She edged up closer to him and thought about offering him a breast, but rethought it. For one thought, it felt dismally maternal. For another, his black eyes were so steady and clear that she couldn’t quite find the courage. And for the final thing, it just didn’t sound right. Perhaps she’d misunderstood when village women talked of men supping at their breast, for all they were babes in arms.
She moved back and let her hands run from his lean cheeks to the strong cords of his neck, down to the ridged muscles on his chest. Were all men so muscled? His nipples were flat against his skin, and his mouth opened slightly as she touched them, although he made no sound.
It would be nice to hear him make a sound in his throat. Not looking at his eyes, she ran her fingers over his chest again, but he was silent, just waiting.
His pantaloons fastened themselves at the waist, but she wasn’t certain he would allow her to disrobe him. It wouldn’t suit his Puritan tendencies, that was certain.
She bent over him, and her hair fell forward, creating a little curtain around their faces. Then she licked his bottom lip again. A woman could spend her life tracing that line, feeling the quake low in her stomach at the curve of it, the softness of his lip, the strength of it.
A huge hand came to the back of her head and pulled her mouth down to his, and in that moment she let her right hand slide from his lean stomach onto the front of his pantaloons. For a moment he went rigid, his mouth warm on hers, in hers, and her fingers curled around him as if of their own volition, and then he groaned into her mouth, a queer, hoarse sound that made her sink from her knees so that she was lying on top of his body, boneless, sinking into him.
His mouth was ravaging her, her hand trapped between their bodies, between the softness of her skin and the fabric of his pantaloons.
And then Emma threw away the idea of winning the challenge. If Gil would just kiss her for another moment, kiss her for another five minutes, let her hand rest on top of that part of him that pushed into her palm, demanding something that she knew little of, but was all too eager to discover . . .
It was the first time that she had entirely dismissed the thought of winning the challenge. Who cared about the challenge? The only thing that mattered was that he was rocking up against her, pushing her legs apart, his knees going where—his hands touching . . .
Then he growled something at her.
He said it again. “I give up.”
She closed her eyes, but she heard him all right. In an instant, she began wrestling with the two little rows of buttons on his pantaloons. But a gentleman’s tight evening pantaloons don’t slide off his legs without help.
He gave a bark of laughter and rolled to his feet. She lay there, looking up at him, knowing she was all white skin and a spread of red hair. He was watching, so she did exactly what she wanted to do, which was move her thighs apart, just a little. Just enough so that her cheeks flooded red at the same time the burning heat in her belly flared.
He tossed his trousers to the side, followed by his smalls. His legs were golden dark in the dim light from Jeremy’s lantern, ridged with muscle and dusted with hair. And then, higher—the color grew in her cheeks but she didn’t look away.
She was pretending to be a widow, but she wasn’t going to pretend to be less interested than she was.
He came to his knees beside her, but instead of throwing himself on her as she half expected, he cupped her face in his hands. “You’re to marry that worthy burgher of yours within a fortnight, do you hear?” he told her fiercely.
She nodded, eyes on his, wondering at the way that love could just rise up and grip you in the heart so fiercely it would never let you go. Those sloe-shaped eyes of his, that lock of hair on his forehead, those lean cheeks . . . “I shall,” she whispered. And, in her heart: I’m going to marry you within a fortnight.
“Good,” he said, as if they’d settled something. “In that case, I give up. I’ll pay you that favor. I’m sorry I ever forgot you, that I ever got drunk in Paris, that I ever—”
She wasn’t really listening. He had a hand on her bottom, and he slid her legs open, and then—and then he came to her.
It hurt, and it didn’t hurt.
Her blood sang and thundered at the same time.
Her eyes closed, and yet she felt she could see through every pore.
He slid in, a little way, and made that hoarse sound in his throat, except perhaps it was she who made it, and then he didn’t move again, so she went where her body wanted to go and arched up, against him, training him, teaching him, keeping him close and mindful and hers.
He was a good learner, for an Englishman.
Of course, she was French, and Frenchwomen are the fastest learners of all.
Chapter Twelve
They left through the front door. Gil left Jeremy’s unlit lantern where he could find it in the morning.
Neither one of them seemed to feel like talking. Emma’s throat was tight with something: tears? She rarely cried and only for a very good reason, so that couldn’t be it. Come to think of it, the last time she’d really cried had been at her mother’s funeral.
Her bejeweled Elizabethan dress felt frowsy now, and unbearably heavy. She couldn’t wait to enter her bedchamber in Grillon’s and collapse in a bed and try very hard not to think about the evening.
She’d won. Her father had Gil’s ring safely stowed away, and she had done her part of the business, and that was that.
Gil was sobriety itself, handing her into the carriage as if she were made of glass. He said good-bye to her there, a sweet little farewell buss on the lips. “I would hope,” he said, “you consider my debt repaid, Madame Emelie?”
What could she say? That the debt he had now incurred would take a lifetime to repay?
“Of course,” she said and gave him a little kiss of her own. “You’re free and clear, my lord.”
“Gil,” he said. But after that, they didn’t say anything to each other.
When she involuntarily winced, climbing down the carriage step, he insisted on scooping her up and carrying her right up the steps of Gillon’s. Emma thanked God for her mask; this story was going to be all over London before the morning gossip columns even appeared. It had to be three in the morning, and yet those who’d come to London expressly for the masquerade were just beginning to drift to their beds. They were gathered in small clusters amongst the exquisite pillars of the entryway.